To Every Age Its Art

New Year’s Eve celebrations in Russia, a few post-Soviet countries and the diaspora abroad have a number of defining characteristics. One is the annual telethon of Soviet film classics such as Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears, a 1980 Mosfilm production that won the Academy Award for the Best Foreign Language Film and a few other accolades. The other absolute classic is The Irony of Fate (1976), traditionally broadcast on 31 December by a major national channel while millions of Russian families busily chop bucketloads of Olivier salad.

However, the generation of Russians born around that time, who are now in their mid-30s and early 40s, are increasingly finding these role models unsuitable for the modern age, and their views downright insulting. Around New Year’s Eve time, Russian social media fills with critical posts from users who are suddenly discovering that their parents’ television favorites promote values that are far from progressive:

“Let’s talk about ‘Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears.’ So how do you find this message: you can become a factory director, a Moscow city council member, a successful mother (and a single one at that), but you’ve only achieved success in life when you’ve fed some soup to your boozed-up plumber boyfriend?”

Such attitudes are still prevalent in Russia, so feminist collective Rosgendernadzor (a play on official organization acronyms meaning, roughly, Rusgenderwatch) summed up these modern frustrations in a series of screencaps from several Soviet film classics accompanied with captions that imagine how a character could have responded to a casually sexist or demeaning remark.

Image from Genderwatch.ru

One of them is from Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears, where the female protagonist is pressured into having sex with a fashionable and well-connected young man above her current station who then abandons her when she gets pregnant.

Or there is another from The Irony of Fate, a highly acclaimed dramedy about two strangers in stable but unfulfilling relationships brought together by New Year’s Eve drunkenness and the ubiquity and uniformity of Soviet mass-produced public architecture.

In a Facebook post introducing this project, Rosgendernadzor’s founder said:

“The New Year’s festivities are approaching. 2019 is just around the corner but little has changed: the same snacks are on the table, the same movies are on the TV and the same views on men and women’s social roles remain in place. This new set of ‘those cards’ is about good ol’ Soviet cinema and gender stereotypes. We decided to butt in on dialogues in films typically shown on New Year’s to give the characters a chance to talk back when confronted with patriarchal views. Such views reinforce unequal relationships between men and women, and they’re not uncommon today. That means that our replies can help you too! Happy New Year!”

The full set of modern takes on Soviet classics in English can be seen here.